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Payments in Asia: a multi-tier economy?

With Mobile Asia Expo kicking off tomorrow, over the next few days on the blog we’ll be taking a look at three key areas of the Asian mobile market, starting with payments.

The first thing to remember when looking at the Asian market is that to consider it as a single entity is somewhat misleading. There are multiple tiers of mobile development in Asia, from mature markets with high smartphone penetration, rapidly-growing markets with huge potential and many others all at varying levels of mobile payments adoption.

Some of the more mature markets have well-developed infrastructures for mobile or contactless payments. Japan is one Asian nation where mobile and contactless payments have been deployed far in advance compared to other countries which are catching up very rapidly, including Hong Kong, Singapore and China. However, while the technology is now mature, adoption levels remain relatively low. It is today very difficult to assess how long it will take for this new tech to become mainstream.